Nice list, but why don’t you use Emacs? I don’t mean to start a flame war if you’re a vim fan — but since Emacs already comes with many of the functionalities that you look for (e.g., email, calendar, org-mode for planning and notetaking, jabber for chat, etc.), it would make sense to use it, wouldn’t it?

As I keep telling you, there ARE other console-based file managers worth considering. Myself, I prefer vifm rather than mc, because (a) it’s more like vi; (b) it’s smaller than mc; and (c) because it follows the Unix paradigm of delegating many tasks to external programs rather than using built-in code, it’s just as powerful while at the same time being much more configurable to my liking.

I admit, vifm’s default colorscheme gives it a clunky feel. Don’t be put off by it. The first thing I do after installing it is to change the color of the borders to the same black as the panes. I suggest you do the same.

I’m nearly as much a fanatic as you when it comes to console apps- in fact, your blog started me down this path three years ago. (So thank you!)

That said, my experiments without X were not as successful as yours, and I came to rely on terminal apps running on a Ubuntu minimal install + openbox.

That list above is fantastic- and my thoughts match yours word-to-word in the matter of Elinks (the only console browser I need), hnb, mocp (easily the best music player ever), and rtorrent (of course). (I haven’t had much luck with axel, though.)

A couple of suggestions though, if I may:
1. wv instead of antiword. wv converts Word documents to Text, Html, LaTeX, RTF, PS, PDF and Abw (among other) formats, which is great for viewing, printing and even editing (LaTeX or Html) complex Word documents.

2. Emacs over Vim: I’ve been a Vim user for four years now. Vim is very powerful- combined with regular expressions, there isn’t much I can’t do in Vim when it comes to plain text. Even so, I tried Emacs recently on a whim, and was blown away once I wrapped my head around the whole Elisp thing. Like gregbognar mentioned above, it comes with email, calendar, a file browser, and many other apps in your list integrated into it, and since the interface is unified,
i) They play very well with each other.
ii) you won’t need to remember separate keyboard shortcuts for all of them.

Also, Emacs plays nice with external programs- much better than Vim does. (For instance, Cutting text in Emacs automatically places it in the global X clipboard; it takes a little coercing to get Vim to do the same.)

Probably u want to make howto for centerim Kmandla like cplay?(which i found it as my favorite music player for now)it looks like a replacement for pidgin or kopete, but i dont know how to use it :) Thx

> mc, as if there was another console-based file
> manager to consider
Or is there?

During it’s best days, the famous norton commander had a quality spinnoff – the dos navigator, a few years ago they released it to the open source and while the original has only support for dos, it has been forked to windows/os2 (http://www.dnosp.com/e_index.php; look here for docs) and linux (http://ndn.muxe.com/)

I’m trying axel too, and have already seen how it yields faster downloads. It intrigues me enough that I’m probably going to crack open the source code to see how it merges the output from multiple connections…

My attempt to follow you to the framebuffer failed when I discovered just how much I use spreadsheets. They are just my favorite way of organizing things, and oleo is not an option. Still, my current SliTaz+dwm setup allows for lots of console apps, and with 1 gig of RAM I can afford a little bloat :P

I’m really starting to like dvtm more than screen. It is more powerful than I remembered…